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The Significance of the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index

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The Significance of the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index Financial Secrecy Index What does the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index tell us? The significance of the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index The Financial Secrecy Index turns the spotlight on the providers of international financial secrecy. In doing so it has important implications for how we understand and tackle the world of financial secrecy. The politics of secrecy Many of the jurisdictions listed in the FSI have commonly been described as tax havens, widely perceived to be “sunny places for shady people” – mostly small palm-fringed islands filled with sleazy law firms, motor yachts and brass plates of shell companies. The FSI reveals a much richer and more complex political story: the world’s biggest players in the supply of financial secrecy are mostly not the tiny, isolated islands of the popular imagination - but rich nations. Most are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and many which are not OECD members can be considered ‘satellites’ of OECD countries such as Britain. OECD member countries and their various dependencies account for 84 per cent of the world market in offshore financial services. And, as Chart 1 reveals, OECD member countries are clustered above the dark green (least secretive) bar on the secrecy spectrum. Chart 1: OECD members/dependents by secrecy scores 91-100 AN, BM, TC, 81-90 MS, VG CH, KY, JE, GG, Chart 1: KEY 71-80 AI, GI The bars in this chart range LU, JP, AT, IM 61-70 between red indicating exceptionally secretive, to dark US, DE, BE, CA, green indicating moderately 51-60 KR, FR, IL, PT secretive. GB, IE, IT, NL, 41-50 See Appendix 1 for the country HU codes used in this chart. ES, DK 31-40 Source: FSI 2011 This has enormous implications. The G20 group of countries have given the Paris-based OECD responsibility for tackling tax havens (or secrecy jurisdictions as we often prefer to call them.) 1 Version dated 3 October 2011 © Tax Justice Network 2011 Financial Secrecy Index What does the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index tell us? Within the OECD, more important details emerge. The fact that United States is a top secrecy jurisdiction, both at a Federal level and on the level of individual U.S. states, is immensely significant with respect to the politics of financial secrecy and the possibility of tackling it. Not only that, but half of the top 20 jurisdictions in the FSI are European Union member states or their dependencies: the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Jersey, Germany, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, United Kingdom, Belgium, Austria, and Cyprus. The EU clearly has major political responsibility for tackling the problem. Domestic secrecy interests are fighting current European efforts to increase transparency. A third and extremely important major pole is British. The British connection Various OECD member states run satellite secrecy jurisdictions, Britain’s network looms unusually large, accounting for about a third of the global market in offshore financial services. Ten secrecy jurisdictions on our list are either British Crown Dependencies (such as Jersey) or British Overseas Territories (such as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda) while many others are members of the British Commonwealth. These jurisdictions generally share British common law, deep penetration by British financial interests, typically use British-styled offshore structures such as trusts, usually have English as a first or second language, and mostly have their final court of appeal in London. They generally serve as a network feeding financial business into the City of London: in the words of Mark Boleat of the City of London Corporation, they “bring business into London that otherwise would not come.” Through capturing offshore business from countries around the world, this British network of secrecy jurisdictions has been, since the era of globalisation began in the 1970s, among the most important reasons for the reach and power of the City of London. As Chart 2 reveals, most of the British jurisdictions are clustered towards the top (more secretive) end of the secrecy spectrum, with the Maldives and Nauru sharing the dubious distinction of being exceptionally secretive. Read our report about why the sun never set on the British Empire of secrecy jurisdictions, exploring the history and context for the UK and its satellite secrecy jurisdictions. 2 Version dated 3 October 2011 © Tax Justice Network 2011 Financial Secrecy Index What does the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index tell us? Chart 2: The British Empire by secrecy scores NR, MV 91-100 AG, BM, BN, BS, BZ, GD, 81-90 KN, LC, MS, SC,TC, VG,VU AI, BB, BW, DM, GG, 71-80 GH, GI, JE, KY, SG IM Chart 2: KEY 61-70 The bars in this chart range CA, CY, IN between red indicating 51-60 exceptionally secretive, to dark green indicating moderately secretive. GB, MT 41-50 See Appendix 1 for the country codes used in this chart. 31-40 Source: FSI 2011 These power blocs - the OECD, the EU, the USA, and the British empire of secrecy jurisdictions - constitute formidable obstacles in the way of tackling tax havens. Despite the global fiscal and social crises, powerful interests in these countries ensure that they remain committed to protecting the interests of their powerful elites, via the secrecy that they provide. This is to the detriment of their broader populations, and to those of the wider world. Is the era of banking secrecy over? On April 2, 2009 the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations met for the G20 summit in London and committed to tackling tax havens, declaring that “the era of banking secrecy is over.” However, at the Seoul G20 summit in 2010 leaders reaffirmed their commitment merely to “continue our work to prevent and tackle corruption” and to “promoting propriety, integrity and transparency in the conduct of business affairs ”. This seems to be a retreat from their stronger 2009 statement. Since 2009, progress towards tackling offshore secrecy has been extremely limited. Formal banking secrecy remains intact in 51 of the 73 countries included in the 2011 FSI, and recent deals initialed by the governments of Switzerland, on the one hand, and Germany and Great Britain, on the other, constitute serious threats to European efforts to tackle bank secrecy. 3 Version dated 3 October 2011 © Tax Justice Network 2011 Financial Secrecy Index What does the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index tell us? As we have mentioned [click to “what is financial secrecy’ on the home page], the ‘banking secrecy’ mentioned by G20 leaders is only one part of the story. Serious tax evaders often hide their identities behind offshore companies, and 69 of the 73 surveyed don’t require details of company beneficial ownership to be made available to any public authority. Not a single one of the 73 makes real beneficial ownership information publicly available on the internet, as they should. Similarly, offshore trusts, foundations and other entities remain wholly secretive in all but one of the jurisdictions included in the 2011 FSI, and no progress has been made towards requiring their proper registration and disclosure of financial records, including payments to beneficiaries. Powerful countries have blocked attempts to make trustees responsible as ‘paying agents’ for cooperating with tax information exchange – a potentially highly useful tool for information exchange. Across the range of indicators the FSI reveals that financial secrecy continues to thrive. Claims to the contrary are common – and must be treated with great scepticism. There have been snippets of good news here and there. The OECD has, admittedly, encouraged jurisdictions to sign several hundred so-called Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) with each other, to encourage information-sharing. Still, an examination of the details of these reveals this effort to be little more than window-dressing (see box). Box: the OECD’s Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) TIEAs are bilateral agreements between two jurisdictions to exchange information with each other. In theory, if a secrecy jurisdiction signs a TIEA with another country, that country can ask the secrecy jurisdiction for information about its own taxpayers with assets in the secrecy jurisdiction. However, the OECD-styled TIEAs are hopelessly inadequate. They are full of loopholes, and to use them you must already, essentially, know the information you need before you can even ask for it! Developing countries have almost entirely been left out of the expanding network of TIEAs, and nearly half of the agreements published by OECD have been signed with Scandinavian countries, while many, many others were signed between tax havens. (See this briefing paper for details on the failings of the OECD TIEAs, and see our dedicated web page on information exchange for news and updates in this broad area.) The OECD had pressured secrecy jurisdictions to sign TIEAs through a black, grey and white list of jurisdictions, depending on how many TIEAs a jurisdiction had signed. It is telling that the OECD’s black list was declared empty by April 7th, 2009 – just five days after the G20 statement. As of August 10, 2011, only five jurisdictions – all minnows – were on the grey list, with the rest claiming coveted ‘white list’ status. One might argue that the expanding TIEA network is an improvement on the previous state of affairs, and on a narrow perspective it certainly is. However, on a broader perspective, the whole arrangement might be considered worse than useless. The granting of ‘white list’ status to so many secrecy jurisdictions which continue to hide oceans of dirty money behind their secrecy facilities sends a dangerous (and false) message that has seriously dented political will for real efforts to make global finance more transparent. 4 Version dated 3 October 2011 © Tax Justice Network 2011 Financial Secrecy Index What does the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index tell us? The OECD’s Global Forum on transparency has a new peer review mechanism launched in 2010 which has the potential to be a significantly stronger source of pressure on jurisdictions to amend particularly egregious legislation.
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